Burma Sahib

by Paul Theroux

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of The Mosquito Coast and The Bad Angel Brothers comes a riveting new novel exploring one of English literature’s most beloved and controversial figures—George Orwell—and the early years as an officer in colonial Burma that transformed him from Eric Blair, the British Raj policeman, into Orwell the anticolonial writer.

At age nineteen, young Eton graduate Eric Blair set sail for India, dreading the assignment ahead. Along with several other young conscripts, he would be trained for three years as a servant of the British Empire, overseeing the local policemen in Burma. Navigating the social, racial, and class politics of his fellow British at the same time as he learned the local languages and struggled to control his men would prove difficult enough. But doing all of this while grappling with his own self-worth, his sense that he was not cut out for this, is soon overwhelming for the young Blair. Eventually, his clashes with his superiors, and the drama that unfolds in this hot, beautiful land, will change him forever.

Release date: February 6, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 352

Sample

1
The Herefordshire
East of Suez

“That braw lanky laddie,” the woman in the upper-deck first-class saloon said, squinting and hitching herself forward in her chaise longue for a better view.

Her white summer dress tickled her ankles, and today—the sun slanting through the window—she wore a pale, wide-brimmed hat, crowned like a lampshade and with a similar tilt, to cut the glare.

As she raised her binoculars and peered through them toward the bow of the ship, her loose sleeves slipped to her elbows, the whiteness of her dress making her skin seem yellow. She scowled, sour-mouthed, dazzled by the sun, showing her teeth, then pawed at the adjustment wheel on the binoculars to focus on the young man. He was facing the stern, and so facing in her direction.

“He’s there again, Alec,” the woman said.

He wore a creamy, new-looking linen jacket, baggy gray trousers, and scuffed plimsolls. Watching the shore recede, he leaned into the breeze, his tie lifting sideways and beating against his shoulder. He saw the distant shore slipping beneath the water, a low brown hill where, minutes earlier, men in biblical robes, one leading a plodding camel burdened with bales and others with hoes, had been chopping clods of earth, working in the early November sunshine, under a cloudless sky. The last of Egypt.

“Same spot. In that pairishing heat.”

She studied him intently; scowling, he was smoking a cigarette, frowning as he contemplated the flattening shore, the afternoon sun on his young earnest face.

“Ek aur,” the mustached man next to her said to a hovering waiter. Unlike the alert woman, propped up and fascinated, he reclined on the chaise longue, his feet on the leg rest, toes upraised. Now he tapped his empty glass. “Burra peg.”

“Always alone,” the woman said. “Quite often he has a buik under his arm.”

The man did not reply. Holding his gold wristwatch in his hand, he began winding it, having set it to the new time the captain had announced earlier. He buckled it to his wrist and admired the way the prism of its crystal caught the sunlight. As he was smiling at the blaze on the glass, the waiter returned and bowed, lowering his tray with the drink on it, murmuring, “Sahib.”

“He was yip-yapping in French, when we went ashore. In Marseille. And French again to some hawkers in Port Said.”

“Bloody Frog, Edith,” the man said, lifting his drink and sipping, then lapping droplets from his mustache. “Mystery solved.”

“Not at all,” the woman said, and smiled with certainty. “He’s English.”

“With an attack of the parly-voos.”

“Don’t be wicked, Alec.”

Smacking his lips, and with a hint of impatience, the man said, “Can’t see why you’re taking such a desperate interest.”

The woman steadied her binoculars and held her breath, in the manner of someone trying to identify a bird on a branch. “He’s refained.”

“Pardon?” the man said sharply.

“I’m thinking of Muriel,” the woman whispered, as though the young man might hear, though he was forty yards distant, still at the bow rail, watching the shore.

Sighing and lifting his glass, the man drank, and swallowing seemed to swallow whatever he was going to say.

Still whispering the woman said, “He might be just right for her.”

“Really.” The word was plummy with disbelief. “Probably a planter’s bairn, off at Colombo, up to the tea estates.”

“He’s booked through to Rangoon.”

“You talked to the chap?”

“I talked to the purser,” the woman said, setting the binoculars onto her lap and staring at the man, with a smile of defiance.

“Half the ship is going to Rangoon.”

“He’s in first class.”

“Along with masses of others.”

“He’s single.”

“I should jolly well hope so, he’s hardly twenty-two.”

“Nineteen,” the woman said.

“Unsuitable.”

“But his tie,” the woman said and handed him the binoculars. “Have a dekko.”

The man muttered “dekko,” in a tone of annoyance. He hummed as he looked through the binoculars, then said, “Blue stripes.”

“Eton,” the woman said, clamping her teeth on the word.

Now the man jammed the binoculars against his eyes and looked closely at the tie, flung over the young man’s shoulder, where it still flapped. He returned the binoculars to the woman who had just lit a cigarette. Making a fish mouth in triumph, she blew a plume of smoke at the man.

Waving the smoke aside, the man said, “I’ll arrange to have the captain invite him to dinner.”

 

The tall young man—Eric Blair—had been waiting for this moment, the ship released by the local pilot who’d guided the Herefordshire through the canal and who’d just reboarded the escort boat that had drawn alongside. The Herefordshire’s captain grasped the handles of the ship’s wheel—easily seen through the slanted windows of the bridge—and the engines began grinding and groaning, louder as the speed increased, and also thumping under Blair’s plimsolls. The smudge of a small coastal town slipped below the horizon.

“‘Somewheres east of Suez,’” Blair was murmuring with emotion. He hadn’t felt this at Port Suez, among the souvenir sellers and the gully-gully man producing a live chick from a startled child’s ear; nor at the crowded bazaar, buying his solar topee; nor seeing some crew members spread small thin carpets on the afterdeck and kneeling to pray. That was prologue. He held the poem’s words as pleasure in his mouth—he didn’t want to be seen smiling.

That was when he had turned, his tie blowing over his shoulder, as he faced the blue water of the gulf, the sun behind him heating his head, the low brown profile of the shore on both sides receding so quickly he could easily imagine he was in the open ocean—even though he knew from the map in the lounge that the Red Sea lay ahead, and later the Indian Ocean.

Where the best is like the worst—the lines running through his mind. Where there aren’t no Ten Commandments . . .

Now he could not resist smiling—no one could see him—he was facing forward, gladdened by the accelerating engine, the obvious speed and slosh, after the plod through the canal. The bow wake parted the sea, a greeny-blue spearpoint.

An’ a man can raise a thirst.

For the rest of the glowing afternoon he remained on the bow deck, peering ahead, thinking, I’m on my way, his decision seeming somehow more serious and strange as the heat of the day burned against his head—this heat reminding him that he was entering a new zone, a new climate, sailing to the far corner of the British Empire where it was likely just as hot, maybe hotter.

What pleased him was that Eton was in the past—he was no longer a schoolboy, and in his mind’s eye he saw himself in his school uniform—the top hat, the tailcoat—he shook his head at the memory, with his friends, fat little Connolly, spotty Hollis, round-shouldered Runciman, walking solemnly to chapel or to exams, or garbing for combat in the Wall Game. It was hardly like study at all, but rather a pompous version of youthful folly, odious little snobs innocent of the world. The misery of trudging around Agar’s Plough with his parents after tea on a visitors’ day. Then, remembering his tutor Gow chalking Greek letters on the blackboard, Blair admitted to himself that without Gow’s teaching, his India Office exam results would have been poorer—he might not have passed.

He saw himself bent over Greek prep, he saw himself defying the master of the college, bossy John Crace, he saw himself in the exam hall, he saw himself now, as though he was a spectator standing apart on the deck, a second self, keenly aware that he was playing a role—this nameless alter ego, clear-sighted and quiet and rational, and sometimes appalled by what Blair was doing, or saying—a weird self-conscious detachment, intense now, surrounded by the greasy-looking surface of the Red Sea, sailing to a fate he could not guess at, but in progress, and irreversible. He had committed himself to it for five years, and as the ship plowed on, the vibrating engines numbing his feet, he realized that he could not think for a moment about going back. He sensed the weight of his parents’ concentrating on him—their hopes, their seriousness, their need for him to make a success of his job. And that wearied him, his necessity to please them—his father especially, old and sullen and disappointed in himself, Opium Agent Fourth Class (Ret’d), fixing his eyes on him and saying gruffly, “Don’t let us down, Eric.”

That was a needle. He’d posted a letter at Port Said, describing the ship, the food, the passengers, the weather in the Mediterranean, their first sight of Egypt. He’d write again, he said; Colombo was a week away—he’d mention the camels and Kipling and the canal, and his reading, the H. G. Wells novel, and he added his wishes to his sisters, Avril and Marjorie. Blair had written, too, to Jacintha Buddicom, a short note, with a poem he’d composed after Gibraltar, mentioning the ship’s bow “thrusting majestically through the Pillars of Hercules,” the memory of its mawkishness embarrassing him now.

His detachment remained, the hovering, watchful self, seeing the young man in the jacket and tie on deck, like a character in a story, knowing what the young man was hesitant to admit: that he was uncertain; that he really didn’t have a clue; that he was to be a policeman.

The click of shuffleboard discs woke him from his reverie—two men behind him, poking their cue sticks at the discs and bantering.

“Chance your arm, Basil!”

“I will and all. But I need a wee sharpener. Allow me to fortify myself with a bit of barley-bree. Steward!”

“Sahib!”

It was the hour of deck games and strollers, the sun hanging low, leaving the port side in shadow, the hour that Blair always chose to slip away, back to his cabin, hoping that no one would speak to him. And trying to avoid seeing David Jones, his fellow candidate in the police, also headed to Rangoon, who occupied a nearby cabin.

“You may have to face the ugly fact that you can’t do it anymore.”

“Not”—and Blair saw the mustached man push with his cue stick—“perhaps with the same penetration. But you might be surprised.”

“Perish the thought. Oh, crumbs, a near miss!”

“Deck wants scrubbing.”

As the two men jawed, a turbaned waiter approached with a tumbler on a tray.

“Stop right there, my man!” the mustached man shouted.

“Sahib.”

“Lussen, when I push I need a guid clean thrust. I can’t have you dancing attendance. I want you absolutely rigid.”

“Yes, master.”

“And bring us each another chotapeg of Jameson’s.”

“Yes, master.”

Wary of slipping past the men and being greeted, Blair had crept to the rail, out of sight of the men but still within earshot.

“Our friend Alec.”

“Poodle-Wilmot. Ha!”

“There’s talk his missus put the shutters up.”

They were whispers, but audible enough.

“Sairten latitude on this vessel for rumpty-tumpty.”

Blair feared being seen, he felt complicit, hearing the men talk, the shuffleboard discs clicking. He sensed his face heating and knew he was blushing, hearing the whispers, the insinuations. He slid along the rail toward the lifeboat and the door to the stairwell. On the cabin deck two women walked past, their skirts swishing, not greeting him, hearty with each other.

“Rafe’s a bounder—”

“My Frank’s no different.”

They knew each other well, the men talkative and fraternal, the women like sisters; all the passengers seemed on good terms with one another, even if half the time they were gossiping. It was a seagoing community of Anglo-Indians, clerks and bureaucrats and their memsahibs, brothers and sisters.

The Raj afloat, with intimacies that Blair found astonishing for its clubby candor, or more than clubby, an extended family of smug overlords and philistines—not one of them he’d seen in a deck chair had been reading a book, though many of the women had their nose in a magazine. He’d felt conspicuous with his book, the Tono-Bungay he’d wanted to reread. A book told so much about the person reading it. But these were outgoing, social creatures, chatting among themselves, dining together, dancing and changing partners. And many had the peculiar plummy accents of English people who’d lived abroad for years, who’d refined and improved their lower-middle-class accents, making the women sound actressy and the men bluff, honking and huffing, “I say, my dear chap . . .”

Blair cringed to think he was judging them so harshly, that he found the Scots the most tedious and at times uppity, sometimes echoing the porkers he’d known at St. Cyprian’s, boasting of hunting or fishing attended by “Our gillies . . .” What appalled him was a fear he could not share in any letter home, that he was facing a future with these people, that they would be his superiors. Painfully conscious of his youth, he longed for June, when he would turn twenty.

And something else niggled him about the other passengers, and it was unbearable at times. Listening to them reminiscing about India, or complaining about babus and servants, they spoke in the Anglo-Indian tones of his father and mother, of the chowkidar and the amah, the chai wallah and the syce. The common language was the language of the Raj, and Blair hated being reminded of it. They knew each other well, but he did not want to know them. And I don’t want them to know me.

It was easy enough to avoid them. They were occupied with games, with drink, with food, with music in the first-class saloon—he could hear it now, as on every other night, the ship’s small dance band, Reg Melly and his Mello-Tones, vibrating in the steel plates of the deck, the walls of his cabin, seeping through the portholes.

I found my love in Avalon

Beside the bay . . .

He hated knowing the words, they lodged in his head, but that one, “Avalon,” was better than Reg Melly’s snarly, winking version of “Ain’t We Got Fun”:

Every morning, every evening

Ain’t we got fun . . .

By now, past Suez, he’d unwillingly learned Reg Melly’s whole repertoire, and he despised himself for it, the way the songs worked their way into his head and jarred his evenings, reading Wells to the lyrics “Though April showers may come your way.”

Those were the tunes tickling through the walls; but it was worse above decks, much worse in the dining room and the saloon, the smoking room and the library, the eye-blinding music from seven to eleven, and the drunken hoots afterward as the roisterers made their way back to their cabins.

How do I avoid knowing them, and their knowing me? It was perhaps simple: stay in my cabin. The bed could have been bigger—his legs were far too long for this berth—but it was luxury to have such privacy after the continual intrusions of Eton and his parents sniffing scrutiny at their small house in Southwold. Blair knew he was a boy, but there were moments on board the Herefordshire when he imagined he might pass for a grown man.

The band was playing “Avalon” again. He’d heard it in Southwold on the wireless when he was cramming for his exams. Thankfully, tonight Reg Melly was conducting the Mello-Tones, and not singing the words, and as the band played he knew from the syncopation that the passengers were dancing—he’d seen them in the Mediterranean, as he walked the deck, glancing through the window of the lounge, thinking, I could never do that, glad to be anonymous.

American music, most of it; the English were besotted—they loved Al Jolson in blackface. Blair wanted to be satirical, yet the songs made him melancholy and somehow reminded him in a mocking way of his distance from home. And though the passengers listened to be soothed by the music, they seemed more ridiculous and sad, cheering themselves with the mawkish sentiments of popular songs and dancing like fools.

When at last the music stopped, he immersed himself in Tono-Bungay and thought of a line for a poem he might write, “The last of England sank below the sea, and—something-somebody—remembered me.” It would be a frightful poem. Why bother?

In the morning, Ramasamy, the Indian steward, tapped lightly on his door as usual and brought him a tray, his cup of tea, and on another saucer an envelope with the Bibby Line insignia of a red flag on the flap, and blue lettering, EA Blair Esq.

“What’s this?”

“Chit, sahib. From captain, sahib.”

Blair waited for the steward to leave, and then tore open the envelope and read: Captain Robertson requests the pleasure of your company at the Captain’s Table on November 10, 1922, at 1900 hours.

2. The Captain’s Table

Blair’s method of pondering the unwelcome invitation was to scrutinize his face in the shaving mirror as though to discern the truth in his expression. He despaired of his pale schoolboy face, the weak evasive eyes, the plump cheeks, most of all the soft mouth, which a mustache might improve. And the angle was lopsided and wrong, because he had to stoop to see himself, he was too tall for the mirror, as he was too long for the berth. He knocked his forehead whenever he entered the lavatory. He knew he would be conspicuous for his height at the captain’s table, and for his youth, and for having nothing to say in the way of conversation. The invitation was a challenge, it made him uneasy, he saw helpless anxiety and indecision in the reflected face in the dimpled mirror.

“Going out to be a policeman, sir,” he heard himself saying, and thought, Oh gawd.

Apart from a few words with Jones, or the steward, Blair had not spoken to anyone on the ship. He had mainly kept to his cabin, with his books; he’d taken his meals alone, vaguely disturbed by the excessive amounts of food. On deck, he’d hidden himself, strolling with his head down, or keeping to the bow rail, forward of the cranes and the citadel of lounges, stacked one on another, his back to the windows and the passengers. As for small talk, he’d always made a dog’s dinner of it and hated talking about himself.

But the invitation was an order.

He brooded all the next day, imagining an interrogation, improvising answers and explanations. It was not that he felt intruded upon, but merely that he was losing his anonymity and would need to be resourceful in devising plausible responses. He had no fear that anyone would get to know him—he knew from Eton, the posh boys, the beaks, how to be implacable. His objection to the captain’s table was his vague annoyance that he would be dining elbow to elbow in forced intimacy with passengers who knew one another well. That, and the regret that he would be denied the pleasure of reading H. G. Wells over his meal alone in his cabin.

All dinners on board were formal, and he was not used to evening dress, but how was this so different in any way from his schoolboy plumage at Eton? Still, he was tying his tie with reluctance, frowning at his face in the mirror, when his door chime rang. He opened the door to an Indian in a white uniform, red cummerbund, red turban.

“I am Ranjit Singh, sahib,” the man said. “I am charged with guiding you to captain’s table.”

“Lead on, sardarji,” Blair said. “I won’t be able to find it without you.”

But the man had paused to smile and stroke his beard and say with feeling, “You are knowing this word sardar,sahib?”

“I got it out of Kipling, who knew Sikhs.”

“Thank you, sahib”—bowing and turning sharply on his heel—“Captain’s mess, sahib. Adjacent to first-class saloon.”

The Indian steward, trimmed beard threaded with white hairs, his turban wrapped tight, had a military bearing, his shoulders squared, his posture erect, and though Blair saw that he was only a few years older than himself, there was something about the man that suggested hardship, the white in his beard, his lined face, his wounded eyes, and he walked with a slight limp, his left leg dragging, scuffing the edge of his blancoed shoe—yet he kept in stride.

“Will many others be there, along with the captain?”

“Always full table, sahib,” Ranjit Singh said, without turning.

Blair groaned inwardly and braced himself. A full table,he thought, then pondering it—Maybe it’s better that there be many rather than a few: easier to conceal myself among the many.

Down the passageway and along the bulkhead to the ladder leading to the first-class saloon, making way for couples heading to dinner, Blair felt conspicuous, following the limping Indian. He decided not to ask any more questions for fear of being overheard. As always, among others, he was conscious of his height, instinctively lowering his head, almost bowing, when encountering other passengers, such as the red-faced man in tails at the entrance to the lounge, biting on a cigar and with a grimace of curiosity as he bit, turning to stare at the tall young man with a prowling gait following the bearded foot-dragging Indian.

Through an alcove to a varnished teak door with an oval window, its glass etched with a floral motif and the one word Private.

“Come in!” The summoning voice was assured and somewhat gruff, but when Blair entered, the speaker—in a dark uniform trimmed with gold braid—stepped forward with a welcoming smile and blue friendly eyes.

“Who do I have the pleasure of welcoming?”

“Blair, sir.”

“What’s your poison, Blair?”

“Sherry, sir.”

“We have an assortment of venerable whiskeys,” the captain said. “But as you wish. Singh, a schooner for our friend Blair.” He turned aside. “These fine people”—stepping back to gesture to a group nearby—“will also be dining with us tonight.”

As he gave the names, the people smiled and hummed hello, and Blair murmured their names in his mind, to remember them—Alec and Edith Peddy-Wilmot; Hamish and Rebecca Christie—“Jamie and Becca,” Hamish clarified; the Reverend MacIntosh; and as the captain was introducing them, Singh began guiding an old woman through the galley door. The woman wore black, a draped dress that fluttered at her ankles, and she seemed spectral, her thin face like parchment, the bones showing through, less a face than a skull.

“Our dear Mrs. Hargreaves,” the captain said. “I believe you know these people, but Mr. Blair might be new to you.”

“Good evening,” the woman said, without interest, keeping the words in her mouth, and she clutched her bag with both hands and raised it as though to defend herself.

Behind Blair a man was saying to Singh, “Muje pyaar lagi hai,” as Blair turned to smile, baffled by the words.

It was Hamish Christie. He said, “I’m thirsty.”

“Have some wayne, Jamie!” a woman called out.

Blair edged toward the sideboard, and he felt excluded as he had the previous day—and most days—that everyone on the ship seemed on good terms. He continued to smile, sipping his sherry, not knowing how to acquaint himself with the others—their loud good humor seemed clubby and patronizing, elbowing him away. He wished to be in his cabin, in the shadows at the bow of the ship, in a corner of the smoking room—anywhere but here.

“Good evening, my boy. You’re Blair.”

It was the Reverend MacIntosh, smiling softly, pinching a small glass of sherry near his chin but not drinking.

“Yes, sir,” Blair said and, stumped for something to add, said, “Is your church in Rangoon?”

“Goodness, no,” Reverend MacIntosh said, disapprovingly. “I’m in blessed Moulmein, the whole of Mon State is my parish.”

And Blair stammered, reminding himself that he must not say that he had family there, his mother’s people, the French Limouzins, whom he thought of as “the Lemonskins,” his grandmother and his uncle and cousins, an old colonial family. Visit them, Eric, his mother had urged. But they had done the unthinkable, two of the men marrying local women, producing half-caste children, and the whole lot of them were hanging on and probably despised. The very thought of them in Moulmein, a living embarrassment, deterred him from imagining any sort of visit, except covertly, under the cover of night.

“I should like to see Moulmein one day,” Blair said, sipping his sherry, hoping he sounded sincere.

“You’ll always be welcome at St. Matthew’s.”

Someone was insistently tapping his arm. It was the woman Edith Something, grinning, clownish, her gleaming lipstick enlarging her mouth. “I’m seated next to you, young man. Aren’t you the lucky beast.”

The rest of the diners shuffled around the table, examining the place cards that had been propped behind the plates. Blair found his card and sneaked a look at the woman’s—Mrs. A. Peddy-Wilmot.

As the captain took his seat at the head of the table, the skeletal Mrs. Hargreaves removed a handkerchief from her sleeve and pressed it to her mouth and coughed into it, her shoulders heaving.

She gagged a little then said, “Where shall we be tomorrow, Captain?”

“Passing Jeddah at first light.”

“And Aden?”

“Day and a bit, taking on some passengers and fuel. I’ll have Reginald Melly rouse his men and do the usual—play ‘The Barren Rocks of Aden.’ Then a straight shot to Colombo. I’ll arrange to have fine weather for you.”

No one spoke—soup was being served by an Indian waiter, ladling it from a tureen—and then the Reverend MacIntosh said, “Bless us, O Father, Thy gifts to our use and us to Thy service. For Christ’s sake, Amen.”

“Amen,” came the murmurs and throat clearings.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Hargreaves said. “I’ll be so glad to be back in Colombo.”

Hamish Christie said to Blair, “Dear Mrs. Hargreaves was in Colombo when the Worcestershire was sunk.”

“Bibby liner,” the captain said. “That was in ’17.”

“One of your ships,” Blair said, and he felt eyes on him as he faltered for anything more to say.

“Mail steamer,” the captain said, filling the silence. “Hit a mine set by a Hun ship, the dreaded Wolf.”

“Hun battleship?”

“Merchant vessel, filled with guns and torpedo tubes. Battleships were tied up in the Channel.”

“News to the lad,” Alec Peddy-Wilmot said.

“It was shocking,” Mrs. Hargreaves said.

“Why on earth—Ceylon?” Blair said.

“To impress the wogs with German power,” Hamish said. “It was delubrate.”

“They talked about nothing else afterward, the natives,” Mrs. Hargreaves said. “They could see the whole show from the harbor, the great ship going down, the Germans slipping away. They were cock-a-hoop and knocked my garden about.”

Hamish said, “Filthy monks in Burma, too.” In a low scarcely audible mutter he added, “A ghastly little bawbag in the bazaar had the cheek to gloat to me about it.”

“Jerry got what was coming to him,” Edith Peddy-Wilmot said.

“My grandson served in Flanders,” Mrs. Hargreaves said. “He was invalided out.”

“Our Singh can tell you a bit about that part of the war,” the captain said.

“Ye sairved, did ye?” Hamish said

“Oh, yes, sir,” Singh said, as he limped to the buffet, carrying dinner rolls on a silver bread basket.

“This ship, our dear Herefordshire, nearly bought it in a convoy in the Med just a year later—1918,” the captain said. “I knew the skipper. Safe pair of hands. He was on the bridge and saw a brace of torpedo tracks coming straight toward him. Ordered the helm hard over and one engine full astern”—the captain raised his soup spoon and spun it slowly. “One torpedo missed his stern by about a foot, the other torpedo hit the Sardinia, just behind him.”

“And sank it?” Blair said.

“No fear. Sardinia’s skipper, Millson by name, was a clever chap. Transferred his passengers to a warship, and seeing that his starboard bow was close to collapse from the hit, he ordered the ship to be sailed backward—I repeat, backward—for sixty miles to the port of Oran in Algeria. Saved his ship.”

“Bibby has a heroic impeedial record, laddie,” Hamish said.

“We’re so prood of them,” Edith said. She tapped Blair on the arm and said, “Our captain’s too modest to say he was an awardee. Aye, Dougal Robertson, mentioned in dispatches.”

The captain shook his head and gave a grim smile. “We all did our bit.”

“Puling togaither,” Alec put in.

“Oxfordshire was converted to a troop ship, carried thousands of men, and dear old Herefordshire was also a troop ship, hospital ship, merchant vessel, what not—and now your home for some weeks.”

As the captain spoke, the soup bowls were collected, Singh supervising, the waiters scurrying, bending low.

“And what sort of duffrent muschief were you getting up to at that time, laddie?” Alec said to Blair. “Give us a hent.”

“School,” Blair said and, realizing he was fingering his tie, hid his hands beneath the table.

But it was prep school, not Eton, that came to mind. Hearing the hated burr at the table, the jaw-twisting haws, the pretentious fluting, he remembered the curious cult of Scottishness at St. Cyprian’s, the headmaster’s sadistic wife, “Flip” Wilkes, pestering the Scottish boys to wear kilts in their ancestral tartan instead of the school uniform, loving the Scots for being grim and dour and “prood,” and extolling Scottish chieftains. She claimed Scottish ancestry and regarded Scotland as her private paradise, shared by the moneyed English boys who spent their holidays there and boasted of “our gillies.” Blair glanced around the table at the gabbling faces and thought how he was once again stuck in a glottal-stop ghetto of Scots.

“My grandson left school to volunteer,” Mrs. Hargreaves said gravely. “He was gassed. Third battle of Wipers.”

“Was he badly injured?” Edith asked. “Poor chap.”

“Can’t bear to talk about it,” the old woman said, squeezing her eyes shut.

“What school, laddie?” Alec asked, his face forward, persisting.

“Eton,” Blair said, pressing his damp hands together beneath the table.

“I know what he was getting up to,” Hamish said, nodding to Alec. “Being debagged at bump suppers.”

“I reckon you were a proper little swot,” Alec said.

Blair attempted a smile. “Bone idle. Absorbing wisdom unawares, if at all.”

“And whit pray tell will you be doing in Burma?” Alec asked.

“Police,” Blair said. “Training in Mandalay at the outset.”

“Alec’s fushing for clues,” Hamish said. “Do ya ken what you’re getting yourself into, lad?”

“Not entirely sure. I have, I suppose, a few equivocal notions of what the job entails.”

“Dinna fash yoursel’!” Alec said. “I’m with the police—superintending Insein Prison—and I can assure you the job entails three things. The first is supairvision. The second is supairvision. The third is supairvision.”

“Duly noted,” Blair said. “Very helpful, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“I’ve had shattering rows with my deputy at the prison on that score.”

“Putched battles, more like,” Edith said, sniggering.

Before Blair could reply, Singh was beside him with a platter of vegetables, spooning them onto a corner of his plate. Blair had leaned back to give Singh room to serve, while two other Indian waiters fussed, refilling glasses. Hamish canted his head toward Edith with a stage whisper, cupping his mouth, saying, “Bandar.”

“Yes?” Edith said.

“Monkeys,” Hamish said, more loudly.

But the attention at the table was on a man in uniform who had entered the dining room and was conferring with the captain on what seemed an urgent matter.

“Our quartermaster,” Alec said to Blair. “He’s frightfully grand. Our lives are in his hands.”

The man was young, blond, fresh-faced and fit, dignified even as he bowed his head to speak confidentially to the captain, while unfolding a sheet of paper—a ruled chart—which the captain studied, tapping his finger on it.

“You have my blessing,” the captain said.

As the quartermaster was leaving, he stepped aside to allow a waiter to pass, the waiter with a tray on his shoulder, custard puddings in thick bowls.

“The famous Wall Game,” Edith said. “Were you a dab hand?”

“I reckon I was adequate,” Blair said.

“Your first time out this way?” Alec asked.

Blair was on his guard, feeling interrogated by the man who said he was a policeman.

“Born in Bengal,” he said. “Brought to England when I was just a tot.”

“Our Muriel was born in Poona,” Edith said. “Such a bonny lass. Was your father in the sairvice like Alec?”

“Opium agent,” Blair said, and regretted that he was giving information, but it was unavoidable, these were direct questions. He cautioned himself against revealing that his father had been a lowly subdeputy in obscure Motihari.

“My church is in Moulmein,” Reverend MacIntosh was saying to Mrs. Hargreaves. “The local Karen have become quite pious. A lovely lot.”

Blair reminded himself again that he must not inform the table that his mother had been born in Moulmein, that his grandmother still lived there. And so he listened, bending over his custard, but merely poking it with his spoon, feeling too full to eat it. When Reverend MacIntosh said he visited a parish across the river—“the ruvver”—in Martaban, Blair thought, “The wildest dreams of Kew, are the facts of Khatmandhu, and the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.”

“You nae finished your fuid,” Edith said.

“I’m full up. Not used to so much custard.”

“Aye, it’s a right bug bowl,” Hamish said.

The captain said, “You good people mustn’t mind me. I’ve been summoned to the bridge, but you’re welcome to enjoy your coffee in the lounge if you like. And there’s brandy and port, of course, and a selection of cheroots for the gentlemen.”

“Our dhobi loves her cheroot,” Edith said.

Whacking great cheroot, Blair thought and almost said so. But as soon as the captain left he seemed to take the vitality from the room with him—conversation slowed and stopped. The diners flapped their napkins and tossed them on the table, and they left in pairs, first old Mrs. Hargreaves and the reverend, then Hamish and Rebecca, and, last, the Peddy-Wilmots, Edith saying over her shoulder to Blair, “It would be ever so nice to have you for tea when we arrive in Rangoon—that is myself and my daughter. Insein is quite near, but Alec’s terribly busy with his prison.”

“Supairvision,” Alec said. “Desperate little babus and evil dacoits, and some political monks. My deputy is new and naïve. Don’t you be new and naïve, my lad.”

“I’ll endeavor not to,” Blair said.

“Laddie looks nairvus,” Edith said with a wicked smile.

“And my assistant superintendent—another new chap, not the crabbit one I refaired to—won’t be laughed out of his ludicrous ideas.”

 

Left in the room alone, Blair reflected on his performance and judged it a failure. He had said too much. He had felt mocked for being a schoolboy, he knew nothing of the sinking of the Worcestershire, which had meant so much to them, and Wipers was just a name attached to slaughter.

“Sahib, may I fetch anything for you?” It was Ranjit Singh limping toward him.

“I’m fine, but tell me, sardarji. You served in the war?”

“Ninety-Third Burma Infantry—but we were based in Barrackpore. Our unit fought in many places.”

“France?”

“And Egypt and Mesopotamia.”

“And Wipers?”

“Passchendaele, in ’14. Same area as Madam Hargreaves’s grandson.”

“Beastly luck.”

“No, sahib. Good luck. I was invalided out. Many of my comrades were less fortunate. I met Captain Robertson in hospital in Kent, and he hired me as steward. Excellent luck, sahib.”

As he limped away—ah, it was a war wound—Blair slipped out to enter the first-class lounge, but seeing the Peddy-Wilmots and the Christies at a table laughing, drinking, he hesitated and stepped back, not wishing to be seen and beckoned (“Laddie!”) for fear he’d have to sit and chat and be questioned further. So he returned to the passageway that led to the captain’s mess and searched for another exit.

Just then a door was flung open and a man entered and blocked the narrow passageway—the blond quartermaster in his smart uniform, who’d conferred with the captain on what seemed a matter of grave importance. But the man was startled and lifted his hands, which held a bowl with Blair’s dabbed and uneaten custard pudding, brimming as he halted and spilling over his fingers. He grunted, as if in objection, and turned his affronted face away and pushed past, still clutching the bowl.